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Hello friends!

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I know I haven’t sent one of these newsletters in a while — but I’m hoping to get back on track with a regular monthly schedule from now on! I’ve been busy starting up my new YouTube channel and also one other thing that I’ll talk about at the end of the newsletter, so stay tuned!

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Spaaaaace News!

There has been a whole galaxy of space news since the last newsletter, but the biggest thing was the total solar eclipse in April that was visible from most of the eastern part of North America. I was lucky enough to see the total eclipse in 2017 in a little town called Salem near Portland, Oregon, so I didn’t make a special trip to see this one. But my friend’s brother-in-law Paul Owen (host of the Sunday Night Astronomy show on Rogers TV) did, and he got some incredible photographs!

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Solar eclipses are really cool. We’re lucky to get them at all. The Sun is just over 400 times larger than the moon and just under 400 times farther away, so they appear almost exactly the same size to us. That lets us safely view the solar corona during the moment of totality. Like this:

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Pretty cool! It’s at moments like these that we can see the Sun isn’t a perfect sphere after all, but has a lot of stuff going on at the edges. If only we could build a spaceship with super-thick sunglasses and fly it up close, we’d really see something amazing! Well, we did that, and the European Space Agency recently released some stunning movies of what the sun looks like up close.

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All I can say is that it’s a good thing we’re 150 million kilometers away!

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Speaking of the moon, the Chinese Academy Of Sciences just released a brand new geological map of the moon, based on information from multiple space agencies and spacecraft, including their own. These are the first detailed geological maps of the moon created since the Apollo days, and are much higher resolution than the ones created half a century ago. These maps will be useful for upcoming American and Chinese manned landings.

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Sci-Fi News

It’s been a pretty good couple of months for science fiction fans, at least on television. Netflix released the first season of its adaptation of Liu Cixin's The Three Body Problem. The series is really well shot, and follows the events of the first book fairly closely. This, of course, made it slightly less exciting for me to watch, as I’d already read the complete trilogy. But for people coming in cold, I think they did a good job. The characters spend a lot of time explaining exactly what is going on, which is probably good for a modern distracted audience, but I felt it lessened the drama by taking out a lot of the subtext.

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Some of the characters have been moved around, and instead of everyone being based out of China, most of the protagonists live in London. Still, they managed to cast some really good actors, including my favorite, Benedict Wong as the lazy yet stubborn detective Clarence Shi. If you haven’t read the books, the series is definitely worth watching.

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The other big show that released recently was Amazon Prime’s Fallout, based on the video game series of the same name. I’ve been a huge fan of the Fallout games since Fallout 3, but I was worried that this would be yet another video game adaptation that fell short of the mark. Instead, I was pleasantly surprised to find that the show feels exactly like the games, yet it also works as a show, with interesting characters who inhabit a broad spectrum of morality as they try to navigate a fallen world. It’s really fun to watch, even if you haven’t played the games. And it just might (as apparently it has for hundreds of thousands of people around the world) convince you to check the games out. I would recommend Fallout 4, the most recent one, to start with. But Fallout New Vegas is the best.

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Personal News

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As I said earlier, I’ve been pretty busy lately. Not only did I start a new YouTube channel, Micro History, but I also wrote an article on the history of computer-based messaging software, which was published last month on Ars Technica. I did a bunch of research for this one, trying to piece together the puzzle of how the world went from a handful of nerds punching in messages on mainframe teletypes to half the world spamming social media sites on their phones. If you’re interested in how we got from there to here, and what societal implications happened along the way, definitely check it out!

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Well, that’s all for now. Next month, we’ll move on from the sun and the moon, and check in on how the rest of the universe is doing. Until then, keep looking up!

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Jeremy

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